Mozilla sets aside single sign-on initiative

After working on Persona for nearly three year, Mozilla is leaving behind its in-house single sign-on service and handing over further development work to.

Initial called Browser ID, the feature was developed by Mozilla in 2011 to be used by Web site and app developers as an alternative log-on tool to multiple Web sites. It provided users with a single email address and password that was supposed to be secure, cross platform and easy to implement.

Adoption of persona, however, was not as widespread as Mozilla would have liked it to be.

“Persona is living proof that federated authentication on the Web can be more safe, usable and private,” the free software and browser developer said in a recent blog post. “…For a variety of reasons, Persona has received less adoption than we were hoping for by this point.”

While Mozilla reduced the scope of Persona and stabilized its core APIs in the last quarter the organization said it realized that “adding more features was not the way forward.”

With Persona’s framework in place, Mozilla said it was entrusting further work on the tool to the development community and reallocating Persona’s full-time developers to other projects.

Mozilla gave its assurance that it has “no plans to decommission” Persona but it engineers who were working on it are now assigned to other projects such as the FireFox Sync and Firefox Accounts.

Sync and Accounts are part of a suite of integrated services that include Firefox Marketplace and FindMyDevice which are important to Firefox and Firefox OS, the low-end mobile device operating system.

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